The Secretary

Short story. A young woman goes to collect her inheritance.

4.1k, rated M. Content warnings for loss of a loved one and non-graphic references to sexual assault.

Sarah had never even known the man, so when the letter had come, it had been a surprise. She hadn’t even been sad at first — she’d felt somewhat guilty about it, but her initial response had been irritation, anger.

Her father had never bothered to meet her, and yet here he was, dying and leaving her paperwork to fill out, all this shit to go through, all this stuff to do. It’s not fair, she supposes, to be pissed off with him just for dying, but —

Life isn’t fair.

When she arrives at the house, he’s waiting outside for her.

“Good morning, Miss Bleecker,” he says quietly. The greeting is curt and polite, neatly clipped, and there’s no smile on his face. “I’ll be here to assist you with cataloguing Mr Ancel’s things, everything on the property.”

“Hi,” she mutters.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says.

“It’s not much of a loss for me,” she says. “I never knew him.”

His face is completely blank. She had assumed on sight that he was a lawyer, but she’s not so sure, looking at him now — he’s tall and square-shouldered, wears a woollen jumper over a crisp white shirt, and the sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, showing tattoos inked all across his forearms, his hands.

Across his knuckles on his right hand are the letters S-A-I-L, and on his left, A-W-A-Y.

“My name is Palmer,” he says, and turns on his heel, walking into the house and away from her.

Not a lawyer, then — the lawyer had mentioned him in the letter. Palmer was her father’s secretary, before he died.

It’s a big house, and when she goes inside she expects it to be as beautifully kept and manicured as the flowerbeds and carefully pruned fruit trees in the garden, but when she steps over the threshold and takes a few steps down the corridor, looking through some of the doorways, she sees that isn’t the case. Many of the rooms are filled with furniture and stacked boxes covered over in white cloths, plainly unused.

“Kept for the purposes of your inheritance,” says Palmer as he pushes the door shut behind them. “Family heirlooms. Valuable, some of them. He didn’t want you to think he was trying to cheat you out of them.”

Sarah stares at him, trying to make sense of that. “Why would I think that?”

“He was aware of how certain behaviours might be interpreted,” Palmer says. “Other people’s perceptions of him made him extraordinarily anxious.”

“He had anxiety?”

“Often.”

“What else made him anxious?”

“Crowds. Open spaces. Large dogs. Horses. Spiders, scorpions, snakes. Tumours. Radiation. Loud noises. Quiet noises, if they were suspicious.”

“Everything made him anxious.”

“A lot of things,” Palmer allowed. “He didn’t leave the house often.”

“That why he hired you?”

“I never asked. Maybe.”

“He never had girlfriends?”

“No.”

“He didn’t remarry?”

“No.”

“My mother said he never loved her,” Sarah says. “That they got married and he walked out when she said she was pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you tell me if you did, or keep it secret?”

Palmer stands there with his hands behind him, his chin high — he’s stood to attention, she thinks, like a soldier, or a sailor. “Your father employed me to keep his confidences,” he says, “among other things.”

“Even after he’s dead?”

“Especially now,” he says solemnly. “Who else remains to keep them?”

Sarah turns away from him, clenching her hands into fists at her sides and then opening them, shaking out her wrists. “All his family died during the war?” she asks as she moves forward, her boots loud on the polished wooden floors of the corridor.

“Yes,” says Palmer. “His brothers both died in the trenches. His mother and father were in a motor accident. Various aunts, uncles, cousins perished too. He returned home to find no one waiting for him but your mother. They’d already been affianced.”

“People used to think there was something wrong with my mother,” Sarah says as she puts her hands in her pockets, looking back at him. “That he left her and became a shut-in and didn’t want anything to do with us. That it was because of something wrong with her.”

Palmer looks back at her, unblinking, unflinching. His voice is entirely reasonable, tones calm and placid, as he says, “I don’t believe that was his intention.”

“He ruined her life,” Sarah snaps at him, whirling around, and God, why should she feel so angry? Why is there so much anger in her, now, when the man’s already dead, when it has nothing to do with her except that now she has a whole house to organise and arrange and get off her hands?

“I’m sorry she felt that way,” says Palmer. He doesn’t sound remotely like he means it.

“What did he need a secretary for, anyway?” she demands, marching into his space and looking up at him. “He was an author, right?”

“Yes,” says Palmer. “I was his go-between for his publishers, his editor. I went to the post office for him, helped him draft, fixed his typewriter once or twice a week. He could never keep it in good repair.”

“You like him?”

“Very much,” Palmer whispers, “I did.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“I’m not very expressive by nature. Your father understood that — embraced it, even. Perhaps that’s why we were such dear friends.”

“Friends.”

Palmer arches an eyebrow. “You’re unfamiliar with the premise, I take it.”

It pops the bubble on her anger, almost makes her laugh, but doesn’t quite. “Ouch,” she says.

His face doesn’t move an inch. “Shall we begin?” he asks.

* * *

They go through her father’s things piece by piece — furnishings, art, books. None of it is very personal, and almost all of it belonged to his family, not to him. Things of his grandparents, his parents, his brothers.

They sort what’s to be sold, what’s to be kept — most of it the former.

It’s a few days before they make it to her father’s bedroom.

It’s a neatly appointed room with a double bed in one corner, a desk and chair, an armchair with books piled up beside it on a little table.

Palmer brushes the pile, his fingertips running over the spines. “His to-be-read pile,” he says softly.

They sort through her father’s paperwork, his books, his clothes.

Sarah finds herself staring at the bed, holding a briefcase in her hands.

“He had a lot of pillows,” she says.

“It frightened him to have the room behind him,” says Palmer. “He slept closest to the wall and had pillows stacked behind him, to keep himself walled in.”

“That’s weird.”

“It let him sleep,” says Palmer.

The pillow on the outside of the bed has an impression in it, like it, too, is regularly slept on. She hasn’t given much thought as to where Palmer has been sleeping in the past few days — a guest bedroom had been made up for her to stay in, in another wing of the house. She doesn’t ask.

She finds in the bedside cabinet a spare glasses chain, like Palmer has to keep his reading glasses around his neck. Her father didn’t wear glasses.

She doesn’t mention that, either.

When she goes through the photographs at the foot of her father’s wardrobe, all of them are of him as a young man, laughing at parties, with her mother, with friends, with family. There are a handful of wedding photos in a browning envelope, loose and not put into an album.

In all of them, her father seems stiff and serious, without the smile he had had in the earliest ones.

Sarah sees photographs of her father as a child, even, but none from after the war except the wedding photo, until she opens an address book and a single photo falls out — one of Palmer in sailor’s whites.

She stares at it, at the way he stands to attention in the photo but with a bright grin on his face, one that she wouldn’t have suspected him capable of were she not looking at it.

“You were a sailor?”

“Merchant navy, ’til the war. Toward the end of my enlistment I had a very bad head injury among some other injuries — I recovered after some time, but my vision remained poor afterward. Your father and I convalesced in the same hospital here.”

“So he kept a photo of you in his address book,” Sarah says.

“Things are misfiled from time to time.”

“Top drawer of his desk,” she challenges him. “Close to hand.”

Palmer is silent, frozen in the process of folding a spare bedsheet. “As I said,” he says lowly, not looking at her, “things can be misfiled.”

They go through the rest of her father’s things.

“I’m going to sell the house,” she says when they finish up for the day.

“That’s a very sensible idea,” says Palmer. He doesn’t say anything else.

* * *

Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night, and when she goes downstairs to get a glass of water she finds the secretary sitting beside the fire downstairs, staring into it. He’s drinking gin.

“Did my father drink?” she asks.

He doesn’t look up, or seem remotely surprised by her being there. He doesn’t react at all, just keeps his gaze on the flames. “No, he was frightened of cirrhosis — when he was shot in the gut, the bullet damaged his liver. He didn’t want to risk it.”

“You drank for him.”

“More than I ought.”

“What will you do now that he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Be secretary for someone else?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“I’d hire you if I had work for you.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

“Do you have somewhere you could go? To live?”

Palmer doesn’t say anything, and Sarah feels a twist in her gut, leaning more heavily against the doorframe.

“I, um,” she starts, faltering, “I’ve never been married.”

“Me neither,” says Palmer.

“But,” Sarah starts, and stops. “But, um. You and him. You and my father.”

He finally looks up from the fire, glancing at her, his face tight, his teeth gritted.

“Is that why he left my mother?” she asks. “Because he was bent?” It’s the wrong word to use. A shadow passes over his face, and she regrets it, but she doesn’t know what word would be right, what would be better.

“No.”

“There’s no reason you can’t tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Your father was a very forgiving man. He was nervous, and other people frightened him at times, but he never blamed them, even when they hurt him, or hurt one another. He liked to think the best of people.”

Sarah steps slowly into the room, pulling her dressing gown more tightly around her body as she tries to parse what it is he’s not saying. “What was he forgiving of?”

“Everything. Insult. Injury. Worse. I wasn’t. He would give me very strict instructions when he was having a disagreement with a publisher or similar, to ensure I passed on his good will and not my irritation.”

“He never loved my mother?”

“He liked her. They were good friends, before they were married. His parents organised the engagement. Your mother loved him, and he was frank with her that he would not return her affections, but she married him anyway.”

Sarah sits down on the edge of the other armchair in the room. Two of them, set before the fire, a paired set.

“So what went wrong?”

A muscle twitches in Palmer’s face. “Your mother never told you?”

“No.”

“You would have to ask her. Your father wouldn’t want me to tell you on her behalf.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes,” he whispers. “Yes, I know. You needn’t keep repeating it.”

“You’re grieving.”

“I am. You would too, if you’d known him.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Palmer closes his eyes, silent for a few seconds, and then he drains his glass.

“Tell me.”

“He forgave everything ever done to him,” Palmer says. “To dredge anything up would be to go against that.”

Sarah chews on the inside of her lip. “My mother hurt him?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You should ask her.”

“She always says she never did anything wrong. That she was a good wife, a loving wife. That he still walked out.”

Palmer’s tattooed knuckles are white on the glass, making the text written on them seem blacker. His jaw tenses. He grunts noncommittally.

“She’s a good person, my mother,” Sarah murmurs. “She cares about people. She helps people. She’s kind — she’s a good person.”

“Your father thought so.”

“Because he forgave her.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t.”

“No,” says Palmer, and she doesn’t know that she’s ever heard such venom concentrated into a single whispered word. “Never.”

“Why’s it your business what my father did and didn’t forgive?”

“Because I kept and do keep his confidences. And even when I disagreed with something he wished, it didn’t mean I had the right to overrule him. That’s what a true marriage should be, I think.” The secretary’s voice remains quiet but not hard, and he speaks sharply. He’s staring into the fire again and not at her.

Her lip is trembling, she realises, her hands tightened in fists at her sides. She feels sick.

When she speaks again, she whispers without meaning to: “What did she do to him? Is that why he was so scared of everything? Something she did?”

Palmer hesitates. “I expect it contributed. He was… not well. He had no friends he thought would understand except me, arrived on my doorstep distraught.”

“My father?”

“It made me very weak to see him cry.”

“He cry often?”

“Not usually. Never in hospital, and never… never in the day. He’d wake sometimes from nightmares, and sob. The war changed him, made him more fragile so that other things cut him even deeper than they might have otherwise.”

“She cut him?”

“No,” Palmer says, almost impatiently. “No, it was… He did regret not knowing you, you know. I don’t know if it should please you to know that or not, but he did regret it. He wrote under a pseudonym, dedicated all his books to you. He hoped that would be something, on top of the inheritance. The money, the heirlooms.”

“It’s not enough.”

“No. But it’s something. I tried to get him to keep the letters he started to you at times, but he always burned them partway through. They were never right, and he would always say nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing if he spoke at all.”

“Don’t tell me he loved me,” Sarah says, unable to keep the sourness out of her voice at the thought.

“No, I didn’t say — I wouldn’t. But he knew he had a duty to you that he never fulfilled, and he did regret that.”

“You tried to get him to write me?”

“I encouraged him even when he couldn’t steel himself to.”

Sarah exhales. “He was scared of me?”

“I think so.”

“Why, ’cause he was scared I’d be like him? Because he was scared of my potential? Some psycho babble like that?”

Palmer mutely shakes his head.

“Tell me.”

He inhales slowly, but the exhale is ragged. She wonders for a moment if he’ll cry, but there are no tears brimming in his eyes. “Did your mother know,” he asks quietly, “that your father had me? That he had a secretary?”

“I… I don’t know. Why would it matter?”

“I don’t think she expected anyone could tell you if you came over here. How old are you now?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Your father,” says Palmer, “was inclined to men.”

“To you.”

“To men, me included. And your mother, she knew that. But she thought… She hoped that that might change. That time together would bring them closer. Would make him love her enough to…”

“To what?”

“You are familiar with the machinations of the marriage bed?”

“Jesus,” she says, and takes the gin bottle off him, pouring herself a measure of her own.

“He didn’t… he couldn’t. With her.”

She stares at the gin in her glass. “So, he’s not my father,” she says slowly. “That’s — that’s what hurt him so badly? That she cheated on him when… why the Hell would he care? If they weren’t…?”

Palmer swallows, and takes a sip of his drink. “No,” he says achingly. “No, he was your father.”

“So he…”

“He never drank with me, your father. He was… He was frightened of cirrhosis, as I told you, and yes, his tolerance for alcohol was shot after the war. But he used to drink a little, in moderation.”

The pit in her stomach twists even tighter.

“He used to be such a heavy sleeper,” Palmer murmurs. “Even after the war, he… It used to annoy me, side by side in our rows of recovery beds. The nurses could never wake him up, and that was without drink.”

She drains her glass, and the gin burns in her throat.

“When she told him she was pregnant, I think she thought he might be pleased, or… she’d wanted a baby for a very long time, which he used to tell me was only natural. If he was sleeping, after all, it might as well not have happened. Just what was necessary.”

“But that’s — that’s not…”

“No. When she first told him, he thought he knew even then but he asked, sort of. Desperately. Asked who the father might be. Promised to never breathe a word. And when she said, forcing joy, that he was being silly, that of course he was the father — ”

He taps his fingers against the edge of his glass, the gin rippling inside.

“When I say he was distraught, he was… I had seen men half blown to pieces who didn’t sob the way he did on my doorstep. Clutched at me like a babe ’til I brought him inside.”

“You’re lying.”

“You must understand he tired very hard to forget that you had been borne of… He wanted to forget. To forgive — especially because you’d never done anything wrong. But it’s not quite so simple as that.”

“You’re lying,” she says again.

“You think louder repetition makes something true?”

“My mother would never do something like that.”

“Your father never expected it either.” She wants to hit him, but there’s something incredibly bitter, injured, in his voice.

Palmer’s face remains relatively blank, but his hand is clenched into a fist. “You saw the pillows on his bed.”

“Yes.”

“He was… He was alright, some nights. Other nights even to touch me by accident would send him spiralling.”

“You never touched each other?”

“We did. Always with the lights on, always where he could see me. I never crept up on him, never looked over his shoulder. No surprises: keen, clear scheduling. I let him initiate what he wanted.”

“So you let him control everything?”

He laughs, breathlessly, his voice strained. “No,” he whispers. “You have to understand that your father’s domain was incredibly small — the walls of this house and no further. He only enjoyed the garden from the doorstep.”

She stares at him.

“It hurt me sometimes when I couldn’t… get him a birthday cake without warning him, couldn’t hug him from behind. Kiss him without making sure he saw me coming. But that was… It would have been harder to hurt him and know I’d done so.”

Sarah sinks heavily back into the armchair, slumping in it. She feels like crying, but the tears won’t come.

“He forgave her? My mother?”

“He tried to. He said she was trying to do best by all involved — but only because I’d threaten to hurt him if he said it was his fault.”

“You ever do that? Hit him?”

“No,” Palmer says, and puts his head in his hands. “No, I… I couldn’t have if I tried, and he knew that. He knew that I, that I was as soft as he was. Softer, really.”

Sarah sits still in her seat for what feels like a long time. When he holds out his hand for the bottle, she passes it back, watching him pour. She feels numb and tired and angry, and it’s too much.

She thinks about her mother, grimly saying that this inheritance was hers, that after abandoning the two of them for the whole of her life, at least he’d done the right thing and left her this.

“What would you do?” she asks. “If you were me?”

Palmer glances at her. “If I were a 21-year-old girl, what would I do?”

“Yeah.”

“Marry a man I loved,” he says. His eyes are shining now, but he still isn’t crying.

She feels stupid for asking. “Sorry,” she says.

“Me too,” he murmurs.

“What will you do now?” she asks, aware that it’s the second time she’s asking.

“Help you,” he says. “Once all this is done with, uh… He knew that he was ill. You know, that he was dying. I was given very specific instructions.”

“Not to tell me?”

“No, no, he didn’t… He didn’t mention that specifically, mention you. He wanted to leave everything to his lawyer to sort out, for me to take what was mine, was ours, and leave the rest for you. To be gone before you arrived.”

She’s oddly touched by that. “But you stayed.”

“I wanted to meet you, for his sake, I wanted to… Oh, I don’t know. I wanted to provide some sort of solace or explanation. I thought you’d have different questions.”

“Like what?”

He sighs, smiles ruefully. “About who he was. What he was his like.”

Sarah inhales. “What were his instructions?”

“To retire by a beach somewhere. I like the sea, I always did. To get a boat, if I could. He used to want to holiday at a seaside somewhere but could never… Well. I told you he had difficulty leaving the house.”

“That’s it? Just… just be by the sea?”

“Well, he wanted me to be happy, but he knew I’ve never responded well to vague instructions — that was why I went to sea in the first place. Going back was a good start, in his eyes. He told me to kiss some handsome sailors on his behalf, if I could wrangle them. Read good books.”

“His?”

“No. No, I never… I never much liked his books. They’re very good, but they’re murder mysteries. Always gave me the willies, couldn’t understand how he wrote them.”

“Books scare you?”

He softly laughs. “His do,” he murmurs. “He was so often in such terrible fear — it made him tremendously good at depicting it. Evoking it. He used to…” He laughs breathlessly. One of the tears brimming in his eyes drops to his cheek, and it leaves a shining trail as it falls. “He used to censor passages before he’d let me read them.”

“Will you be happy?” she asks in a small voice. “Doing that, going back to the sea?”

“I’ll try,” he says softly. “I always tried to do as he told me if I could. What of you? What will you do, when all this is sorted and sold?”

“I don’t know.” She draws her feet under her, resting her glass against her knee. “Read his books, I guess. That’s a good start.”

“He’d like that. For you to read his books. He used to… He often wondered if perhaps you would.”

“Will you give me your address?”

“Hm?”

“Of the, um. Wherever you go to live, at the seaside. If I could write to you, or just… visit. Sometime.”

He stares at her, his lips parted, so surprised it seems he’s forgotten to keep crying. She’s so unused to him having such an expressive look on his face that she has no idea how to read it.

“If that’s,” she says waveringly, “if that’s okay — ”

“Of course it is. If you want, yes. But you must… you must ask me about him. You must let me tell you about him. He wanted for you to know him, and I’m still here, I can… It’s not too late to know what I knew of him.”

“It’s not enough,” she says.

“No,” he agrees. “But it’s something.”

Sarah takes in a shaky, slow breath through her mouth, stares into the fire.

After a few minutes, maybe half an hour, she asks him a question.

He answers it.

They talk long into the night.

“You said you’d keep his confidences,” she says once they’re done.

“Part of your inheritance,” he says before he leaves the room. “They’re your confidences now.”

The sun is beginning to rise, and peach-stained light shines through the windows.

* * *

When Sarah wakes from bed some time into the afternoon, she picks up the first of her father’s books.

For my daughter, reads the dedication. May she never live as I did.

Wiping her eyes, she turns the first page, and begins to read.

FIN.